EVENTS

First do lots of harm

A member of the hacking group Anonymous broke into the website of Britain’s biggest abortion provider because he “disagreed” with the decisions of two women he knew over their pregnancy terminations, a court heard.

Quite right. Some guy “disagrees” with the decisions that two women made about their pregnancies, so he goes to work to mess up thousands of lives. Because it’s all about him, and his opinions are reason enough to cause harm to thousands of people.

Fortunately he ended up deciding not to publish the details he found by hacking, but not until after he had stolen them.

We’re seeing a lot of this kind of thing. Dude X decides he has a principled hatred of woman Y so by golly he is going to do her harm because he is right and she is wrong. Being right is a license to harm people, according to this way of thinking.

One of the ‘Nice Guy’ type, no doubt. One who bemoans the fact that women only go for “jerks”, and not him, even though he buys them coffee and tells them they could do better, and pushes all the right buttons on the sex dispenser

I knew a ‘Nice Guy’ who was anti-choice because the object of his affections got pregnant, and shock! horror! exercised her right to choose, rather than taking up his offer to marry her and raise the child as his own. That harpy.

Let’s be honest, the whole culture of hackers (including Anonymous) is really based on the rationalization of cyber-vandalism as somehow being heroic. Every attack I’ve seen to date has done damage to the public and next to nothing against the governments and corporations that they claim to be targeting. You really shouldn’t expect adult behavior from many of them (perhaps even most of them)…

A good example of why I’m not comfortable with Anonymous.
Weren’t they originally anonymous so that former scientologists could protest without fear of reprisal?
I could understand that.They had a clear target of their protest. When they decided to branch out into other issues, I had more and more questions about who decides their slate of issues to protest.

I knew a ‘Nice Guy’ who was anti-choice because the object of his affections got pregnant, and shock! horror! exercised her right to choose, rather than taking up his offer to marry her and raise the child as his own. That harpy.

I knew a guy who once helped his girlfriend make the decision to abort a baby they didn’t want. 20 years later, he still didn’t have any kids, decided she should have carried the child so he could be a father, and started advocating for father’s rights to determine the woman’s right to an abortion (never mind that he was quite involved in the decision; she should still have given him a child, because he never had one, and, well, what she wants is of less concern than what he wants).

Then there’s the other trope (can I say that?): a friend who agonized over the issue, decided to marry the woman and have the child, and 30 years later, he can’t imagine life without his wonderful daughter, so now every woman should be required to make the same decision (he doesn’t seem to understand that a key portion of this was that they HAD A CHOICE).

Both of these guys think of themselves as liberal. But still, they should get the say so over what happens with women’s bodies.

With respect, I don’t think you’ve followed Anonymous much. Almost all of their targets are large corporations or government agencies and they are generally careful to avoid harming customers/public. The problem with Anonymous is, as Daniel McCoy says, that without any formal hierarchy, its attacks are left to the discretion of individual hackers. This is both its strength and its weakness. And as this case shows, the tools of hacktivism can be used by an individual hacker to pursue any social agenda, even a regressive one. Given the usual Anonymous ethos of opposing large-scale breaches of privacy and fighting homophobia, I would expect that most of them would be appalled at Jones’s actions, especially as he chose to deface the BPAS website with the Anonymous logo — but the Anonymous ethos also makes it impossible to prevent future Joneses from repeating similar acts with similarly awful potential consequences.

What chrislawson said. Anonymous is not a monolith and there is no hierarchy. It’s not even just for hackers–it also comprises protesters who communicate online (think the anti-Scientology protests, and those who helped organize Occupy Wall Street.)